Quotes from Susan Forward

This is emotional surgery, and as with any surgery, the wounds must be cleaned out before they heal, and it takes time for the pain to go away. But the pain is a sign that the healing process has started.

In many cases, I'm sure that no harmful intent existed, but speculating on intent is a waste of time. It's the results that count. If harm was done by inadequate parents, the intent is irrelevant. Inadequate parents are responsible both for what they did do and for what they didn't.

If, on the other hand, your experiences have been those of being harshly criticized, ridiculed, ignored, abused, or made to feel inadequate, then you're likely to experience low self-esteem.

Adult children of toxic parents have an especially difficult time with their anger because they grew up in families where emotional expression was discouraged. Anger was something only parents had the privilege of displaying.

When we're very young, our godlike parents are everything to us. Without them, we would be unloved, unprotected, unhoused, and unfed, living in a constant state of terror, knowing we were unable to survive alone.

Anger is an emotion just as joy and fear are. It is neither right nor wrong—it just is.

At the core of every formerly mistreated adult —even high achievers—is a little child who feels powerless and afraid.

I felt totally alone, I felt like an awful person, I felt really guilty and very overwhelmed because I was trying to fix things I couldn't fix.

Did it ever occur to you to rescue me? Do you have any idea what it felt like being a little kid in that house? Do you have any idea what kind of terror I lived with every day? Why didn't you do anything about it? Why don't you do something about it now?

There is no eternal blessedness in the world to come because there is no world to come.

When a parent forces parental responsibilities on a child, family roles become indistinct, distorted, or reversed. A child who is compelled to become his own parent, or even become a parent to his own parent, has no one to emulate, learn from, and look up to. Without a parental role model at this critical state of emotional development, a child's personal identity is set adrift in a hostile sea of confusion.

It is a fear that must be defended against at all costs. In an effort to quell his anxiety, he tries to gain control over his partner by destroying her self-confidence, so that she can never leave him and he will be safe.

emotional and mental peace comes as a result of releasing yourself from your toxic parents' control, without necessarily having to forgive them. And that release can come only after you've worked through your intense feelings of outrage and grief and after you've put the responsibility on their shoulders, where it belongs.

As adults, they often become trapped in a vicious cycle of accepting responsibility for everything, inevitably falling short, feeling guilty and inadequate, and then redoubling their efforts. This is a draining, depleting cycle that leads to an ever-increasing sense of failure.

he felt about his inability to open up to anyone emotionally, but I urged him to go easy on himself. He hadn't had anyone to teach him those things when he was young, and they're pretty tough to pick up on your own. "It would be like expecting yourself to play a piano concerto when you didn't even know where middle-C was!

Les had neither the time nor the appropriate role model from which to learn about the giving and receiving of love. He grew up without nourishment of his emotional life, so he simply turned off his emotions. Unfortunately, he found that he couldn't turn them back on again, even when he wanted to

A man who is raised by a misogynistic father can absorb his father's contempt for women very early in life. The boy learns that a man must always be in control of women and that the way to get that control is to scare them, hurt them, and demean them. At the same time, he learns that the one sure way to get his father's approval is to behave as his father does.

While every parental behavior sends out a message of some kind, it is only the repetitive themes that form the child's picture of the world. If a girl sees her mother accepting physical abuse as well as psychological abuse, she learns that there are no limits to what a man is allowed to do to a woman. A battered woman demonstrates to her daughter that a woman must tolerate anything in order to hold on to a man.

Even after we grow up, many of us continue to believe that we have little control over our lives. We may see others as the decision-makers in our lives and come to view life as something that happens to us. This belief system, reinforced by childhood identification with mothers who model extreme dependency and helplessness, set many women up for abusive marriages.

You are not responsible for what was done to you as a defenseless child.

The experience generated powerful, lifelong fears of being hurt and betrayed. Two marriages ended in divorce because he couldn't learn to trust.

Every decision you make becomes intricately interwoven with the rest of your family. Your feelings, behaviors, and decisions are no longer your own. You are not yourself, you are an appendage of your family system.

When you ignore your needs for the sake of your mother's feelings, you are doing a disservice not only to yourself but to your mother, as well. The anger and resentment that you will inevitably feel cannot help but affect your relationship. And if your efforts to make your mother happy fail, you will feel guilty and inadequate.

Rationalization is what we do when we smooth over any insight that interferes with our good feelings. It's a way of making the unacceptable acceptable. By giving good reasons for what would otherwise distress us, we make sense out of confusing and even frightening situations.